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When learning country/place names or reading about non-Chinese people in the media I see the same characters used for similar phonemes (see these celebrities). What rule or list do the writers follow when 'coining' a hiterto untranslated name into Chinese?

Above are for names. I don't think there are rules/standards for any proper noun. As the other answer suggested, sometimes the translation is semantic, mixed semantic/phonetic or something else. Even for phonetic transliteration, people may choose characters to represent subject feelings or style over the one specified by the standard. In the past there were also incidences that one proper noun had multiple translations and eventually one defeated the others.

The desire to represent one's style.

I've never heard about a law that saws parents cannot use x character to name their children. I think such censorship would cause a revolution before youku got shutdown. So following this point theoretically any character is up for grabs.

I read an article about how some of the (very) rare characters cannot be typed into a computer - some of these were used for names and now cannot be because each person must have a computerised record.
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jsjFeb 12 '13 at 16:52

yes, this is true. If you follow the unicode list we are still adding chinese characters. Very carefully
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fourtonesFeb 12 '13 at 17:50

There are actually rules that govern transliterations, but they differ across regions.
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deutschZuidFeb 12 '13 at 20:58